operability is resolved. Intelligence needs very large background knowledge.' Regarding virtual reality (VR) and visual knowledge rendering, Doerr foresaw that in about 10 years these would replace partially verbal communication and training. This was because `VR systems could effectively connect to knowledge bases and allow for exploration of alternative inter-pretations and hypothesis building'. However, in order for this to happen a much deeper understanding of scientific discourse and cognitive studies on the proc-esses of non-verbal thinking would be needed. Fur-thermore, the ergonomy of handling visual interfaces should receive more attention.

In particular, Doerr warned: `If the nature and

structure of the discourse in humanities is not under-stood, we continue to produce computer games. The humanities sector must understand the challenges and be involved in new models of gaining scientific mer-its.' The rationale for this is that if future user portals and various virtual reality systems should become real mediators of rich cultural knowledge, a major change in Arts & Humanities knowledge markets would need to happen. Rich knowledge able to describe, explain and interpret cultural heritage with reference to his-torically different contexts and discourses, may nev-er be mediated by `intelligent machines'. Therefore, scholars would need to be involved on a scale and to a degree never seen before. This would challenge the established internal mechanisms of how scholars cre-ate and receive recognition for their contributions to the disciplinary stock of knowledge.

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Paul Mulholland (The Open University, UK)

thought that a `better use of narrative in the person-alised presentation of digital heritage resources' could be achieved, depending in part on enhancements in the `modelling and inference of user behaviour when exploring physical and virtual exhibitions'. Mulhol-land also expected more use of augmented reality (AR) and mixed media for learning and entertain-ment. But, for educational applications better tools and guidelines for using such technologies would be required. Overall, novel approaches in user modelling, inference from user behaviour, and adaptive hyper-media and AR applications that provide an engaging coherent experience he saw as research strands that would extend well over a period of 15 to 20 years.

Fabrizio Cardinali, Fabrizio Giorgini and Dav-

id Fuschi (Giunti Labs, Italy) added that collabo-rative virtual museums where students and experts could interact through their avatars might be achieved before 2010. For the educational deployment of AR applications with head-mounted glasses (HMG) and similar devices, appropriate models would need to be

developed and validated, to allow for meaningful uses which they expected to appear around 2010.

Interestingly, few other participants mentioned

novel interfaces and interaction devices. For exam-ple, Sofia Pescarin (Fellowship researcher, CNR ITA-BC, Italy) thought that novel 3D interactive interfaces would allow more direct access to complex and mul-timedia information, and that the use of gesture inter-action systems should be explored much further. However, she saw a lack of cooperation among labo-ratories working in the related fields of research.

Jacques Bogaarts (Nationaal Archief, The Neth-

erlands) envisaged completely new geographies of `cyberspace' on the Web in which relationships between objects show themselves `naturally'. Building such a future digital heritage space `that is as excit-ing as a visit to Jurassic Park' could only be achieved within large creative cooperations. Basic requirements would be a not primarily technology-driven model-ling of Web content, huge amounts of digital resources with high-quality metadata, and interfaces to interact more directly with the content.

On the DigiCULT online consultation platform,

introducing the theme of `natural & enjoyable inter-action', large repositories of intelligent digital heritage resources were mentioned. In an interesting note a participant from a university-based research lab asked: `Why the emphasis on large collections? It would be more helpful to think of myriads of small collections and how these can be aggregated and re-aggregated according to the needs of the user.'

Jussi Karlgren (SICS, Sweden) requested more

and better informed information access research that would lead to `flexible tools for the identification of informational items and topical structure in docu-ments', which were missing for text as well as othermedia types. Strong analysis tools should be able to `really model topic, style, foreground and background, usefulness etc., rather than the presence or absence of surface features in the information items (this line of research is proceeding apace)'. However, he men-tioned that relevant research in this direction `is going on at the research frontiers of HCI and IR at present ­ the next few years should show some disjointed publications and some exciting new prototypes that may provoke some discussion'.

Enhancements in natural & enjoyable interac-

tion away from `keyboards and cumbersome displays', according to Karlgren, would require considerably `more advanced methods for the tracking and iden-tification of the social function of information'. He elaborated this further, `most of the information anal-ysis research so far has treated information separat-